I live in an housing association house and no one has asked me to pay a bedroom tax. My grandson lived in the spare room. He killed himself because I was not here to stop him. Does that make me a murderer?

Zen, the lady I mentioned had brought up a family and as kids do, they moved out. She was living in what is called social housing where the Bedroom Tax applies, sadly. She was 53 and had no way of paying the draconian BT after paying her utilities and food, and saw no way out but to kill herself. This is why I said the government has blood on its hands. The System is in place to keep the lesser well off under the cosh.

Strange how private housing is free of this obscene tax.

Maybe we should bring the window tax back ?

This government under the guise of Austerity has made it a culling of the low paid, the unemployed, disabled and elderly(although the elderly are free of the Bedroom Tax).

It isn't an actual tax in the normal sense of the word. It is not a payment made from an earned income. It is a reduction in the financial assistance unemployed or low payed people get to pay their rent. The principle, misguided as it is, is to 'encourage' people to relocate to non existing smaller accommodation in order to alleviate the chronic housing shortage. The phrase is a media invention created to mislead people. The ball on this one was kicked off by Thatcher who took it into her head that people should own their own homes. To this end she started a program of selling local authority owned houses cheaply to the occupiers. Local authorities owned huge amounts of housing stock due to post war reconstruction, much prewar city accommodation having been destroyed and the population, what with returning troops expectations and a new socialist government with welfare state, was increasing. Because very few affordable houses were built for a long period, people who had bought their 'council houses' found they could make a huge profit by reselling them. This created an inflationary situation. We have gone from feast to famine. The population has nearly doubled in just three generations but it appears an anathema to current and recent administrations to reverse the shortage of houses by building more government owned housing for cheap rent. Although, we are running out of space to build them. The irony is, IKEA do a nice flat pack house that you could put up in a weekend. There is a precedent. The good old Prefab. Some of which are still going strong. There is a psychological aspect to the original story. People in the UK become emotionally attached to houses they don't actually own. This has always intrigued me.

Westeners/Europeans are very attached to the land (or house in this case) they live on/in.When they came to the Americas they lost their minds because they wanted to own everything they could see.The Western/European mind wants to own where it inhabits.They are sedentary, root growers. Probably the first farming communities. And as plants and tress, roots grow right there where you are, where you have settled, or plopped.And as all of you who plant know, if you put a plant down on soil, even if you do not plant it, the roots will grow into the soil, and it will live.

The Native Americans were quite nomadic.They felt they belonged to the land. But they believed that land, nature, the world, could not be owned.They still call themselves "the people of the Land".They are travelers, and hunters, (not anymore, that is a sad story I am not going into now).

They are very different mindsets.

Zen Dog wrote:

It isn't an actual tax in the normal sense of the word. It is not a payment made from an earned income. It is a reduction in the financial assistance unemployed or low payed people get to pay their rent. The principle, misguided as it is, is to 'encourage' people to relocate to non existing smaller accommodation in order to alleviate the chronic housing shortage. The phrase is a media invention created to mislead people. The ball on this one was kicked off by Thatcher who took it into her head that people should own their own homes. To this end she started a program of selling local authority owned houses cheaply to the occupiers. Local authorities owned huge amounts of housing stock due to post war reconstruction, much prewar city accommodation having been destroyed and the population, what with returning troops expectations and a new socialist government with welfare state, was increasing. Because very few affordable houses were built for a long period, people who had bought their 'council houses' found they could make a huge profit by reselling them. This created an inflationary situation. We have gone from feast to famine. The population has nearly doubled in just three generations but it appears an anathema to current and recent administrations to reverse the shortage of houses by building more government owned housing for cheap rent. Although, we are running out of space to build them. The irony is, IKEA do a nice flat pack house that you could put up in a weekend. There is a precedent. The good old Prefab. Some of which are still going strong. There is a psychological aspect to the original story. People in the UK become emotionally attached to houses they don't actually own. This has always intrigued me.

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